Cumulus, Dell and Red Hat Partner on Open Source DevOps for OpenStack
Cumulus Networks, Dell and Red Hat have forged a partnership to bring to DevOps efficiencies to the open source cloud by automating networking and deployment for OpenStack clusters, according to news announced this morning.
Broadly defined, DevOps refers to an IT methodology that integrates the different processes involved in building and deploying software or infrastructure. Those processes typically include development, testing, provisioning, deployment and ongoing administration. While different teams would normally handle each of these tasks, creating “siloed” operations, DevOps aims to add efficiency by increasing collaboration between different groups.
To demonstrate the value of DevOps for OpenStack, the open source cloud computing platform, Cumulus, Dell and Red Hat built an OpenStack cluster containing more than 300 nodes. Dell provided the server hardware and networking switches, Cumulus delivered the operating system (Cumulus Linux) and Red Hat’s OpenStack distribution completed the cloud environment.
The companies said they were able to build and provision the cluster in six hours, which is impressive for an infrastructure of this size. But the real kicker is that they did it using only “standard open source DevOps tools,” including Ansible and Git, along with open software-defined networking (SDN) solutions.
The latter achievement is significant because open source continuous integration tools and SDN remain relatively novel innovations. They have not seen a great deal of use in real-world production contexts. The OpenStack cluster that Cumulus, Dell and Red Hat built was a proof-of-concept demonstration, not a production environment. But it shows nonetheless that these processes can work for building serious infrastructure.
For the channel, the takeaway here is that DevOps is now ready to form the center of open source partnerships, which will in turn speed adoption of other open source technologies like OpenStack clouds.
